The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [62]
He remembered being put to bed in a wooden box near the stove and the sound of his father sighing as his sewing machine whirred through the night and seeing the finished garments hanging over the back of the chair the next morning. He remembered the vile choking smell of the communal privy in the yard and the flat smell of chalk on the teacher’s blackboard on his first day at school; he remembered the sour smell of young bodies crowded into the small schoolroom and the sweet smell of the brown braided hair of the little girl sitting in front of him. He remembered straying from the muddy shtetl into the little town and the sound of his boots ringing on the wooden sidewalks and his fear as he stared at the malicious faces of boys who he knew for some reason were his enemies; and their laughter as they snatched his yarmulke, tossing it around like a ball while he stood stony-faced and silent, not knowing what was wrong, only that he was different. He smelled the familiar scent of his mother’s skin as she kissed him and the heavy odor of beeswax candles burning brightly in the special silver candlesticks that had belonged to her mother’s mother, and the aroma of the Friday night food, chicken soup and gefilte fish. Zev’s tiny room would fill with loud, passionate music as he recalled the sounds that had struck terror in his heart, though he had never understood why … the knocking on the door in the darkness of night, the urgent whispered conversations between his father and his uncles, the words he didn’t understand but which frightened him: “the temple burned to the ground, persecution, police, pogroms … injustice, murder. Jew!”
He was seven years old. The journey through the night, Archangel’s dark streets and his mother carrying the precious silver candlesticks wrapped in a blue cloth, the dark ship and the smell of its cargo of freshly cut wooden planks and the terrifying noise they made slipping and crashing as the fierce North Cape seas tossed the small boat around. He saw his mother’s frightened face and listened again to his father’s voice intoning a prayer …
Then a big city, a bearded uncle and a house on a cobbled street; he was not to go out in case … “In case what?” he had wondered with a shiver of fear as they cut off his long side curls “for safety.” He remembered men in dark suits gathering to say the Sabbath prayers and the same Friday smells, the same food, the same frightened dark eyes and low urgent voices….
The big ship towering three storeys high had seemed like a giant whale swallowing them into its stomach along with hundreds of other immigrants. He remembered not knowing what “immigrant” meant. They were not allowed on deck, and on the journey he never once saw the sea. There was no air; it was hot, stifling. The endless sound of babies screaming, children quarreling, complaining of hunger and thirst, falling sick … the stench, the grim acceptance of degradation. And all the while the storms hurling themselves at the ship, lifting it and shaking it like a mad dog with a rabbit. The dank, rancid hold with its human cargo swelled with the sound of people praying, cursing, screaming in fear, vomiting. The sounds and smells were etched indelibly into his psyche to be triggered at any time, always releasing the same panic signals of fear, the sweating, the trembling, the lurching heart….
His father fell ill. He could see him now, lying on the faded blue cloth that had covered the candlesticks, his face grim with pain as he shook with a terrible fever—“dysentery,” the word went round the dark hold like a flame, and soon there were more pale, agonized faces, more sickness. Soon no one cared anymore about the filth and the degradation. They just wanted to die.
His mother went first, lying quietly beside his father while he watched them anxiously. Gradually her face lost its frown of pain and she seemed peaceful. Zev held her hand, happy that she was feeling